WAVE officer Elizabeth Reynard designed the training at the Hunter College boot camp so that women would learn from real life examples – or, in the case of ships, models of the ships the Navy used. Here, 1943 trainees crowd around a WAVE officer to learn about the different types of ships that made up the Navy fleet (and those that the enemy used), with the idea that they would be better able to identify them once they were at their permanent stations.
The photograph comes from the U.S. National Archives.
Hinges of History 